Work Bullies

British culture can throw some curveballs to we North Americans, even we kids of UK immigrants. It is those social causes which do not quite make it here for whatever reason - drink driving (which I understand to be quite legal sub-drunk driving) and adult binge drinking (a real UK issue not to be made light of apparently) are concerns which have not seemingly hit this side of the ocean, though the second would have a US counter-part in the moves in the US against university keggers. But this one is new to me - workplace bullying:

A leading trade union is threatening to name and shame employers who fail to tackle bullying at work. Amicus [Ed.: the union I think] said it received hundreds of complaints every year from members who claimed they had suffered bullying in the workplace...It is estimated that almost 19 million working days are lost every year in the UK as a result of workplace bullying.
Mandy Telford, anti-bullying campaign co-ordinator at Amicus, said: "We know that in the worst cases victims suffer from similar trauma to soldiers after combat.

I am not making light of this as I know many people I have worked with whose lives were made crap by the pressures of work, including (but in no way led by) unpleasant bosses. It is, by its nature, something you might not be surprised to run across in law. But it appears that it is airport workers in the UK who are being identified as a group suffering the most. It is stunning to me that such a stupid way to run a work place still could exist in a western and even union organized workplace but still it all strikes me as very odd.

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Try working at CBC. I have a friend, who shall remain nameless, who was talking to an ex-CBCer about life after the Corp. The former CBCer expressed amazement that there were workplaces in the world where the women's washroom "... wasn't for crying".

The people who work there do so in an environment of collegiality brought on by shared misery and contempt for the PTBIT (Powers That Be In Toronto). The CBC is an exquisite example of an organization that inculcates managers and would-be managers in a culture of "management by bullying".

In my time at CBC, every single woman I worked with broke down and cried after being emotionally beaten up by management. Not some. Not most. Every single woman I worked with.

As for the guys ... well, I didn't see many cry. But I saw coffee cups thrown around rooms, I saw furniture punched, and I saw and heard virtuoso hissy fits and screaming, swearing, tantrums. Myself, when I felt like I was going to explode, I'd leave and walk a few laps around the building. I'm not sure the grass has grown back, seven years later.

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